A Constructive Model of Mother-Infant Interaction towards Infant’s Vowel Articulation

Human infants seem to develop to acquire common phonemes to adults without the capability to articulate or any explicit knowledge. To understand such unrevealed human cognitive development, building a robot which reproduces such a developmental process seems effective. It will also contribute to a design principle for a robot that can communicate with human beings. This paper hypothesizes that the caregiver’s parrotry to the coo of the robot plays an important role in the phoneme acquisition process based on the implication from behavioral studies, and propose a constructive model for it. We validate the proposed model by examining whether a real robot can acquire Japanese vowels through interactions with its caregiver

Cell Density Regulates Antibody Accessibility and Metabolic Turnover of Gangliosides in Human Glioma Cells

The effects of cell density on the gangliosides of 4 human glioma cell lines were studied. The cell lines used were KG-1C (GM3-dominant) , A172 and H4 (GM2-dominant), and Hs683 (GM3, GM2-co-dominant) cells. All these cell lines showed higher immunofluorescence with anti-ganglioside antibodies in FACS analysis at sparse density than at confluent density. Steric hindrance from cell surface proteins had been removed by the pretreatment of the cells with trypsin. The chemical content of gangliosides was consistent throughout the time of cell growth. The mechanisms of crypticity of gangliosides at confluent culture were under investigation. We first evaluated the metabolic turnover rate of gang-liosides at different cell densities. The results clearly showed a more rapid turn-over of gangliosides at sparse density from approximately 2 to 4 fold in terms of radioactivities of incorporated tritium into gangliosides. The profiles of labeled gangliosides were also different between the sparse and confluent cultures. We speculate that better accessibilities of antibodies toward gangliosides should be facilitated by the same mechanism which should, in turn, provide easier access of carbohydrate-hydrolysis enzymes to gangliosides at sparse cell density in order to keep an enhanced turnover rate

The Impact of Reduced Skeletal Muscle Mass on Patients with Knee Osteoarthritis

Although several studies have suggested a possible association between sarcopenia and knee osteoarthritis (OA) in the elderly, there remains no definitive evidence. Recently, however, the serum creatinine/cystatin C ratio (sarcopenia index: SI) was reported to correlate with skeletal muscle mass. The present retrospective study therefore investigated the impact of reduced skeletal muscle mass on advanced knee OA using SI. In 55 individuals scheduled for knee osteotomy or knee arthroplasty, correlations between SI and patient-reported outcomes such as the Knee Society Score (KSS), Knee Injury and Osteoarthritis Outcome Score (KOOS), and Oxford Knee Score (OKS) were explored. Significant associations were found between SI and the KSS functional activity score (β=0.37; p=0.022), KOOS subscale for activities of daily living (β=0.42; p=0.0096), and OKS (β=0.42; p=0.0095). This study underscores the role of reduced muscle mass in functional outcomes and introduces SI as a valuable marker for assessing muscle loss in knee OA patients

Reduction of glycolipids with D-PDMP, a glucosylceramide synthetase inhibitor, caused cell growth inhibition, enhanced cell adhesion, and facilitated cell motility in human glioma cells

Glycolipid synthesis inhibitor, D-PDMP, not only inhibited the production of glycolipid but also inhibited cell growth in human glioma cell line KG-1C in a cell cycle non-dependent manner. The reduction of glycolipid from the cell membrane allowed us to study the biological functions of glycolipids. The ability of cells to adhere to collagen was enhanced by the reduction of glycoli-pids, and random cell migration was also activated by the effect of D-PDMP. The results supported our speculation that glycolipids might function in cell growth, adherence and locomotion

Reducing Data Decryption Cost by Broadcast Encryption and Account Assignment for Web Applications

2008 9th International Conference on Web-Age Information Management (WAIM) : Zhangjiajie Hunan, China, 2008.07.20-2008.07.22Protection of user privacy is an important issue of Web applications. Data encryption presents a possible resolution for improving the security level of Web applications. In this paper, we propose a novel mechanism using broadcast encryption and account assignment methods to reduce the decryption cost of Web applications. A notable feature of our mechanism is that the additional function of the application server is not necessary. Moreover, it is easy to apply this method to existing servers to improve their security level. We also show some experimental results to demonstrate the feasibility of our methods

Security of Social Information from Query Analysis in DaaS

Databases as a Service (DaaS) are recently in the spotlight as an essential component of the cloud computing framework. We can more easily develop applications to facilitate users ' collaboration than without DaaS. Unfortunately, DaaS brings a new risk of data compromise because most data are currently stored and managed by the service provider. Securing users ' information, the data are generally encrypted at a trusted client. Although encryption ensures that no one can sneak a look at the data, malicious users still have opportunities to take users ' relational information. The relational information, which we name social information as opposed to personal information, has not been adequately examined, but it is becoming important because of improvement of social analysis. As described herein, we rst introduce an attack model of obtaining social information from analyses of query logs in DaaS; then we provide a solution to the problem. Our method converts some di erent queries in the same query, so that malicious attackers cannnot analyze the query logs. We also de ne an overhead cost of the translation and propose a method that can optimize the conversion using extensible hashing. 1

A constructive model of mother-infant interaction towards infant’s vowel acquisition. Connection Science (this special issue

Human infants seem to develop to acquire common phonemes to adults without the capability to articulate or any explicit knowledge. To understand such unrevealed human cognitive development, building a robot which reproduces such a developmental process seems effective. It will also contribute to a design principle for a robot that can communicate with human beings. This paper hypothesizes that the caregiver’s parrotry to the coo of the robot plays an important role in the phoneme acquisition process based on the implication from behavioral studies, and propose a constructive model for it. We validate the proposed model by examining whether a real robot can acquire Japanese vowels through interactions with its caregiver. 1

PRELIMINARY REPORT OF LOCAL SEISMIC ACTIVITY AROUND SYOWA STATION, EAST ANTARCTICA

A local earthquake with 20s S-P time was recorded at two seismic stations (Syowa and Tottuki) with three-component seismographs in Lutzow-Holm Bay, Antarctica in June 1987. The earthquake was located at about 170km northeast of Syowa Station. Its magnitude was estimated to be about 1.8. Other ten earthquakes of 20s S-P time were recorded by a test small tripartite seismic array in East Ongul Island during March 1987. The east Antarctic shield has been considered to be an aseismic area. It becomes clear, however, that some local earthquakes are located in the marginal area of the east Antarctic continent